Testing the finger painting feature for OneNote

By now you have probably noticed that we added a new feature to OneNote - finger painting. Read all about it here: https://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-onenote/archive/2013/04/29/onenote-update-draw-on-touch-devices-without-a-pen.aspx

The testing on this was actually pretty fun. In the test lingo, we call this "capacitive inking" since the screens used by the tablets are capacitive. I like finger painting better since it is easier to say (and to type). What really made this fun to test is that we got to use all our tablets together and manually got to draw on pages to ensure we were working correctly. We have automation for inking, but for this particular change we got to do a lot of manual testing. Usually, that is a poor practice since manual testing is so time consuming, but since we got together in a room and shared pages and notebooks, it turned out to be pretty fun.

We also had to test with ensuring the ink added with this client would display properly with all the supported clients and, if they support ink editing, that they could edit it as well. That also brought more folks into the room to verify the other client behavior.

It's not a free - for - all, though. The primary tester here had developed a test matrix and laid out specific test cases we had to cover. For instance, one case was collaborate on a drawing. The intent may be two people trying to lay out furniture together in a room, but we also wanted to cover more than just that. Instead of just a floor plan, there were many cats drawn, lots of graffiti and text phrases from many different languages as well.

We found a few bugs during the cycle but overall it went smoothly. Since this was such a popular feature request, it's great to see it in customer hands already, and early reviews are mostly positive.

Now we are working on solidifying the automation since we don't want to keep paying a high manual test cost. While we are working on that, feel free to sound off here or at the link above (or in the store) about your thoughts on this feature.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John